Subject: Re: US-ASCII vs. ISO-8895

From: "Alan J. Flavell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 1996 20:01:18 GMT

On 31 Dec 1996, Thomas Fritz Ramm wrote:

> Alan J. Flavell ([email-masked]) wrote:
> > It will indeed get rid of the warning.  But the warning is there for a
> > reason.  If your terminal emulation is not, in fact, set for iso-8859-1
> > then it may cause the display of the incoming mail to be corrupted.

> Not only will it get rid of the warning but it also lets pine display
> ISO-8859-1 characters correctly.

Only if the terminal emulation is also set for iso-8859-1.  Which is
what I already said.

> I used to receive e-mail from Europe that
> included some of those special European letters (äÇöß etc.) and Pine would
> not display them until I added ISO-8859-1 to the character set field in Pine
> setup. 

This only demonstrates that your terminal emulation was already set up
for iso-8859-1.  So, you don't have the problem that I was describing.

But it's not such a good idea to recommend that to another, without
explaining to them the issues that are involved.  Could be that their
terminal emulation is set to 7-bit US-ASCII, or maybe to DEC
Multinational, or IBM Codepage 850, whatever.

> All the English letters and numbers are included in ISO-8859-1. There
> is no problem composing in English when using ISO-8859-1.
                                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Of course not.  That was precisely my point.  You have to be using
iso-8859-1 (in your terminal emulation) if you want to configure it
into PINE.

---

From: [email-masked] (Thomas Fritz Ramm)
Date: 31 Dec 1996 18:53:10 GMT

Alan J. Flavell ([email-masked]) wrote:
> On 30 Dec 1996, Thomas Fritz Ramm wrote:
> > In pine go to setup and then config. Scroll down until you find a variable
> > named "Character Set". Add iso-8859-1 as value to that field.That will get
> > rid of the message you desribed above.

> then it may cause the display of the incoming mail to be corrupted(*),
> without any warning.  Isn't it better to get a warning of this
> possibility? 

Not only will it get rid of the warning but it also lets pine display
ISO-8859-1 characters correctly. I used to receive e-mail from Europe that
included some of those special European letters (äÇöß etc.) and Pine would
not display them until I added ISO-8859-1 to the character set field in Pine
setup. All the English letters and numbers are included in ISO-8859-1. There
is no problem composing in English when using ISO-8859-1. In fact MS Mail
uses this set by default (instead of US-ASCII). Of course, if you use ALL
the special characters in US-ASCII extensively, I guess, ther might be a
problem using ISO-8859-1 but I have never experienced it in my three years
on the net.

> (*)There won't be any corruption if, in fact, the incoming mail contains
> only characters from the US-ASCII (7-bit) set. 

> When PINE _composes_ mail, on a configuration whose charset is
> configured as ISO-8859-1 (or whatever the sender may be using), it will
> detect whether the composed mail contains only US-ASCII, and send out
> mail with the charset declared as US-ASCII if it can, and as ISO-8859-1
> (etc.) only if it must.

> Some less considerate mail agents advertise their outgoing mail as being
> encoded in ISO-8859-1, or ISO-2022-JP, or koi8-r, even when in fact the
> content is nothing more than US-ASCII.

> -- 

> best regards

--
Thomas

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